Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?

Most of my automation has to do with personal data backups/exports and various tools I've developed to process it and use [0]. That would be hundreds of jobs scattered across several of my devices.

I have a tool I wrote which is doing periodic searches for specified queries on different sites and generates RSS feeds with new results + HTML reports (so I can find people with overlapping interests, e.g. if the same person matched against multiple queries) [2]. Sort of like google alerts, but much better. So there is some daily scraping for that.

I'm using a somewhat hacky tool which 'compiles' a python spec for jobs to systemd and makes it very easy to maintain. [1]

As for making my day easier.. not always yet, but certainly makes it more fun. I live by the motto "Never spend 6 minutes doing something by hand when you can spend 6 hours failing to automate it" :)

[0] https://beepb00p.xyz/my-data.html#consumers

[1] https://beepb00p.xyz/scheduler.html

[2] https://github.com/karlicoss/axol

I created a script to tarball my git server's git directory, encrypt it, and backup to Google Drive if new commits were made that day.

inb4 "just use GitHub"

A dishwasher is great if you can fill over 50% of it. Will save you couple minutes and effort.

For myself, I automated creation of language flashcards.

So I can just type a word/phrase in English, and then it will automatically fill in the target language translation, pronunciation, audio recording, and word-by-word breakdown to show what every word in a phrase means.

Before I would have to use Anki, and switch back and forth between Anki and various dictionaries, and have to create my own audio recording. Just removes a bit of friction myself learning (Chinese).

Housekeeping service, automatic workstation -> synology nas -> backblaze b2 backup system, shared instacart cart with my wife so that our groceries are tracked where we actually order them.

I've found that a lot of personal automation stuff on the computer just isn't worth it. I try to keep things simple and that reduces the need for automation altogether.

One-line cron job using rclone to sync ~3 TB of photos with the other side of the world. Super simple and reliable.

I’ve mostly given up on tech stack automation for my daily life. But I live and breathe on Reminders.app.

I use to spend a lot of time on Reddit looking for conversations that were relevant to my business. Promoting our products in the context of those conversations usually resulted in sales leads.

I built a tool earlier this year that streams comments from those forums, analyzes them, and pings me when a relevant conversation is found. I generally keep it running throughout the day in my local Terminal.

Journaling.

I have a shell script that that creates a new markdown file for that day, which I write my journal entry into.

Another script compiles a year's worth of journal entries into an epub.

Another workflow I made is similar, but for tasks. So every day I run a shell script that copies the last day's tasks to a new file with the new day's date, forcing me to evaluate what was done the previous day (if anything). Some days are great, some days not so much.

The tasks also show in my browser's new tab page to further reinforce.

One of my favorite automations is a slack bot I made to send me a message when a process finishes: https://github.com/spohngellert-o/SlackProcessTrackerBot

As a data scientist I often run code that takes hours, and getting a slack message when it finishes is super helpful, and it has often helped me catch when a script finishes too early due to some error.

Old school: a timer plug to control a window fan in an out-of-sight-out-of-mind location. It keeps us from having to remember to turn the fan in the guest room on and off to get cross ventilation over the summer.

I use the native Apple Shortcuts app to get my health data from my watch (calories burned, steps, etc.) and send it to my personal db for a dashboard

I use the following in Bash.

    function notifyme() {
       MSG=${1:-'Terminal is done'}
       TITLE=${2:-"Done!"}
       osascript -e "display notification \"${MSG}\" with title \"${TITLE}\""
    }

I use it like:

bin/start-unit-tests; notifyme

   function notifyme
     set MSG $argv[1] "Terminal is done"
     set TITLE $argv[2] "Done!"
     osascript -e "display notification \"$MSG[1]\" with title \"$TITLE[1]\""
   end

   notifyme "Now you can commit and push code"
   notifyme "Now you can commit and push code" "Tests complete"

  /Applications/terminal-notifier.app/Contents/MacOS/terminal-notifier -group not -title "$t" -subtitle "$st" -message "$m" -execute "$HOME/bin/gospace 1"

  osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to key code 18 using option down'

> or other services?

Automatic monthly purchases of low-cost index funds.

This way I don't have to worry (too much) about over-spending on other items as I've taken care of future-me.

Almost all of my personal automations actually make my life more difficult.

I have a cron job on my laptop that loads iptables rules that drop all outgoing packets except to work-related sites (chat, e-mail, issue tracker, code review, plus a handful of reference sites) during my work hours.

I used to have a Twilio phone number hooked up to a Lambda function so that people could press the buzzer box at the front of my apartment building and it would automatically send back the required DTMF to unlock it, then text me to let me know someone had been buzzed in.

Other than that, just some bespoke Tasker automations and some hotkeys on my computer. Reading through this thread makes me feel like a rookie, though.

I never found the perfect note taking and/or scheduling software. So I wrote a Python script which combines several tools which together give me what I need. My entire life revolves around it, can’t imagine living without it anymore.

Getting that sort of system sorted out is maybe the most productive thing you can do because it is meta-productive.

a very simple cronjob which creates a ~/data symlink, that points to ~/works/data/$(date -u '+%Y-%m-%d')

why? I have to deal with a bunch of files at $job. easier when they're all at one place, and I have a clean slate everyday.

I automated my desktop environment configuration using Docker containers. I'm able to go from a headless tty to perfectly tailored desktop environment in ~2.5 seconds. First time start requires a ~40 min build, byut thereafter ~2.5s to start afresh. https://github.com/sabrehagen/desktop-environment

I did the same think for my production application environment. One command to go from no infrastructure to production grade cloud application deployment. https://github.com/cloud-computer/cloud-computer

ctrl+c, ctrl+v

I've found that paying people to provide you with good food saves tonnes of time: shopping, prepping, cooking, cleaning, garbage. Hotel buffet breakfasts or similar are a good solution. This is by far the most time efficient daily hack. Also good are floor cleaning robots. Not owning a car is great too, if you add up all the time doing parking/registration/license/insurance/whatever. Software... well, mostly just avoid closed source stuff where oodles of invested time winds up wasted when they arbitrarily mothball the product, close the cloud or deeply alter the interface without consultation. Keep documentation with code. Keep all code in a revision control system. Oh, and write less code. The less code you have to maintain, the better.

I got sick of opening the same tmux/terminal format every time I had to restart, so I wrote this:

    #!/bin/bash
    
    function command() {
            CMD="$1"
            xdotool type "$1"
            xdotool key Return
    }
    
    function key() {
            KEY="$1"
            xdotool key $KEY
    }
    
    function clear() {
            for n in {1..10}; do
                    key BackSpace
            done
    }
    
    function name_panel() {
            NAME="$1"
            key ctrl+a
            key comma
            clear
            command $NAME
    }
    
    name_panel 'cmd'
    
    key ctrl+a
    key c
    name_panel 'srv'
    
    key ctrl+a
    key c
    name_panel 'make'
    
    key ctrl+a
    key n
    
    echo "Now type ssh-add to log in..."
    ssh-agent bash

    [ $1 ] || { echo "Notify what?"; exit; }

    curl -X "POST" "https://push.techulus.com/api/v1/notify/$PUSHKEY" \
         -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8' \
         -d $'{ "title": "Linux",   "body": "'$1'" }'
     
    echo;

I use this app[1] that notifies my cellphone, so I wrote this bash script that I call when a long task is done, so it notify me when I'm away.

1 - https://push.techulus.com/

Ring has been a fun! One of my holiday todo's is to finally sit down and program the IFTTT integration for my Amazon plugs to turn my garden lights on when my Ring Doorbell detects motion.

If you have someone you'd like to get interested in IoT and/or programming, it's probably the best feedback loop between effort and reward you can find -- up there with learning to program HTML/CSS/JavaScript and refreshing a web app on local